Mistake 1: Focusing on quantity over quality

Posting less 3X our reach and engagement

As we have been producing a lot of content on our blogs and podcast, we had many things to share. So we shared — a lot. Also, to fill our Buffer queue, we might have included content which was good, but perhaps not the best.

Limiting our Facebook posts to just one or two per day forced us to share only the best content. These quality posts resonated with our Facebook fans, and the Facebook algorithm surfaced them to more people.

Small business owners and solo social media managers usually don’t have the time to create or find enough high-quality content to post five times a day on Facebook or tweet 10 times a day on Twitter. By reducing the number of times you post each day, you can focus on the quality of the posts rather than the quantity of posts.

We weren’t getting the results we want for the time and effort we put into Snapchat and most of the users on Snapchat aren’t our target audience. Whereas Instagram provides several advantages such as better discoverability, analytics (including audience insights), and audience targeting through ads.

Every additional platform your business is active on means additional time and effort required to create great tailored content for that platform and engage with your fans on that platform.

Take stock of your social media profiles and consider which channels are performing for your business and which are not. By moving away from social media platforms that might not suit your business or not be performing well, you can double down on those that are.

Once we discovered these findings, we started posting more square videos and images on our Facebook Page and Twitter profile. It could be worth experimenting with square videos and images to see if they perform better for you, too.

Do you have any experience with vertical multimedia? How do they perform compared with landscape or square multimedia?

Mistake 5: Sharing only our own content

Curated content helped grow our Facebook fan base

We used to shy away from curated content because we thought it wouldn’t contribute to our bottom-line: traffic, signups, and revenue. It even felt counter-intuitive. Do we really want to send traffic to someone else’s website than our own?

Then, we realized that might have been a short-sighted thinking. While we were marketing to our fans, we weren’t growing our fan base much. So we were marketing to mostly the same people who could potentially be annoyed by too much Buffer content.

When we experimented with posting also content from other sources such as TechCrunch and Wired, our Page’s reach, engagement, and fans grew significantly.

Five out of our recent top 10 Facebook posts are curated from others. In total, they reached over 1.7 million people, most of whom are (or were) not our Facebook Page fans. (For context, we have about 93,000 Facebook Page fans.)

Posting quality content from others increased our brand awareness and following on Facebook. These pieces of content reached people who may not have heard of Buffer before and converted some of them into our Facebook Page fans. Now, we can share Buffer content to a bigger engaged audience.

To quickly find great relevant content on Facebook, use the Pages to Watch feature in your Facebook Page Insights. Here’s a quick video on how it works:

By curating photos that our target audience is interested in (and posting a few Buffer news), we have been able to grow a large engaged following on Instagram—with whom we share social media and marketing tips through Instagram Stories and live videos.

This is the technique we use to quickly find and share UGC on our Instagram profile:

Mistake 7: Not uploading videos onto social media platforms

Native videos are shared five times more than YouTube videos on social

When we were posting YouTube links, our best video post (the one above) only reached 3,397 people. Now, videos we upload onto Facebook receive an average reach of 53,254.

Mistake 8: Not targeting specific audience for our content

Setting preferred audience made our content more relevant

Whenever we have a meetup or workshop, we used to share about the event on our Facebook Page with all our fans.

The issue was that the events are usually in a particular location while our fans are from all around the world. If you are based in London, you most likely won’t find our New York meetup relevant.

So we started using Facebook’s preferred audience feature for such localized posts. For example, when we held a workshop in Philadelphia this year, we restricted the post so that only people in Philadelphia would see it.

While it reached fewer people than most of our Facebook posts, it was highly relevant to them as they Liked our Facebook Page (indicating an interest in our content and events) and live in Philadelphia. At the same time, our fans outside of Philadelphia wouldn’t have seen this post, which was likely to be less relevant to them.

Mistake 9: Not boosting the right posts

Top-performing posts do even better when boosted

When I first started with Facebook ads, I wasn’t sure what do to. In particular, I was boosting posts which I think might do well purely based on gut feeling. That didn’t go well.

Fortunately, I learned a great tip from Brian Peters, our Digital Marketing Strategist. The engagement rate on your existing Facebook posts gives you a good indication of how successful the post is likely to be when boosted.

Click on the drop-down menu in the upper left corner of the “All Posts Published” and select “Engagement Rate”

The posts you want to boost are those with above average engagement rate. For us, that’s posts with 6 percent or higher engagement rate.

You can also use this approach with Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Twitter Analytics also provides you with the engagement rate of individual tweets. For Instagram and Pinterest, you’ll need to manually calculate the engagement rates for each post (you can do this by dividing the total engagement with the reach for Instagram or the impressions for Pinterest).

This approach is great because it encourages you to create quality content that generates great reach and engagement first before spending advertising money to boost your reach. It also prevents you from becoming over-reliance on ads to get reach on social media. As Gary Vaynerchuk said, “no amount of paid media is going to turn bad creative into good content”.

Mistake 10: Not replying to questions on social

70% are more likely to use a brand’s product when the brand responds on social

In the same research, Sprout Social found these great benefits if a brand were to respond to customers’ questions on social media:

70% of people are more likely to use the brand’s product or service.

65% of people have more brand loyalty.

75% of people are likely to share a good experience on their own profile.

While we reply to most questions on our social media profiles, an area we’re working on is to reply (even) faster. Jay Baer found that 42 percent of people who have reached out to a brand on social media for customer support expect a response within 60 minutes.

Using Reply (or your preferred social monitoring and engagement tools), you can quickly respond to all mentions and messages on your Twitter profile, Facebook Page, and Instagram profile from one place.

Keeping up with new changes on the various social media platforms is essential to staying ahead on social media. Did you know for example that Facebook now allows you to upload GIFs? Or that Facebook has also changed the News Feed to encourage high-quality links to be shared? If a piece of social media news […]